


Lift

by wneleh



Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: Abbie Mills explains it all, Episode: s01e07 The Midnight Ride, Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-16
Updated: 2013-11-16
Packaged: 2018-01-01 18:59:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1047443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wneleh/pseuds/wneleh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“London.  That’s a three-month voyage by sea.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lift

Lift  
By Helen W.

Given the whole mess of crazy that was going down, Crane’s indignation about the tour guide and his Paul Revere talking points was equal parts amusing, exhausting, cute, and scary.

 _Deep breaths, Abbie_ , she told herself as she climbed into her sedan. _One thing at a time. Next up, that British museum website._

Which reminded her. “Crane,” she said, “ever heard of an airplane?”

Crane was still fighting with his seatbelt latch. On good days, he got it on the first try. This was not a good day. “I’ve studied geometry from Euclid’s text. In the original Greek,” he said, his voice rising in triumph as the mechanism finally clicked.

“Well, good for you, but that’s not what I meant,” she said, peering out the windshield. How could there not be a plane in sight? Not so much as a hint of a contrail? Sure, the New York City-area international airports were all 20 or 30 miles to the south, but White Plains was only a few towns over, and had fifty-plus commercial flights a day, plus general aviation. 

“Then is an ‘Air Plane’ some building tool, perhaps one which would have been familiar to our late Mason friends?” Crane asked.

“Not even close.” Abbie gave up trying to find a plane and turned toward Crane. “How do you think Jenny travels all over? Or Henry Parish? How can we know so many world travellers if London is” – and she couldn’t help herself, she pitched her voice lower and changed her inflection to match his – “a three-month voyage by sea?”

“I am a world traveller, too,” he said, shrugging. “If one enjoys books it is not the worst of hardships.”

“What would you think if I told you…” And, there it was! A small, dark speck in the sky, coming from the north. Probably from Montreal or even Europe, headed who knew where. “There, Crane, look at that!”

Obligingly, Crane followed her finger. “That bird?”

“It’s not a bird, it’s a plane!”

“It looks more like a point. Or perhaps a line segment, head-on.”

“It’s an airplane. It’s a huge vehicle, like a flying bus.”

“Bus?”

“Long, long car. There are probably dozens of people on board. Maybe hundreds.”

Crane was now peering at it for all he was worth. “So I take it the Montgolfiers succeeded their experimentation?”

“The who-all?”

“Some chaps Ben Franklin told me about. He met them in Paris. They’d noticed that air warmed by a cook fire had the power to lift cloth. One thing led to another, and the last I heard they were endeavoring to attach vessels to the largest fabric envelopes of air they could control. Of course Old Ben and I both realized the enormous practical implications, though I doubted such a contraption could ever lift anyone larger than a small child. Still, a small child could count enemy troops, or position a mirror so as to employ sunlight to blind an enemy artillery crew…”

Crane’s description of a hot air balloon was so round-about that it took Abbie a few moments to figure out what he was describing. Laughing, she shook her head as she finally started the car. “Do you see a balloon? No balloon, Crane. Seriously.”

“It does seem to be travelling rather faster than a cloth full of air could.”

“Hundreds of miles an hour. You can get to London overnight. Just so’s you know.”

Abbie’d expected Crane to be incredulous, but instead he nodded and continued to watch the speck. 

“Can you see its shape at all?” Abbie asked.

“No, not really.”

“Think of a bird. No, no, more, think of this car decked out like a bird. With wings where the doors are, and a rigid tail.”

“Seriously, Miss Mills?”

“Seriously.”

“So it flies by flapping those wings? Building not upon the Montgolfiers but the imaginations of the ancient Greeks, Bacon, and Leonardo?”

Abbie flashed to an image from her childhood – Gilligan in a bird suit, suspended in mid-air, until someone – the professor, probably – told him that what he was doing was impossible. Or was it Barney Rubble? Someone like that.

“No, no, no flapping,” she said. “The wings don’t move. An engine of some sort – sometimes just a huge propeller – moves the plane forward, and the movement of the air over and under the wing gives it lift.”

Abbie held out her right hand, palm down, fingers slightly arched, and moved it through the air between them. “See, since my hand is flat on the bottom…”

“It’s not flat.”

“Pretend it is. Because it’s flat, the air below doesn’t have to travel as fast as the air above. This creates a vacuum above the wing, hence lift.”

Crane was now moving his own hand through the air, faster, then more slowly, then faster again, varying the positioning of his fingers between sweeps.

“Nothing is happening.”

 _Maybe I have the wing shape upside-down_. The line drawing of a wing’s cross-section, complete with air flow, from her high school physics textbook had been sharp in her mind’s eye a moment ago, but was now fuzzy. “We can look it up later.”

Crane nodded, still sweeping his hand through the air, though with less enthusiasm.

“Do these planes ever fall out of the sky?” he asked.

“Just fall out? No. At least, I don’t think that’s really a _thing_ that happens. They do sometimes have accidents taking off and landing.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound so bad.”

“It can be.”

“Have you ever been inside one yourself?”

“Of course,” Abbie said. “Less often than most people, I guess. I went to school local, and I don’t really go on vacations. But I’ve flown to Florida a few times, been out to Chicago.”

“I would like to fly one myself. Some time. If I might.”

Abbie should have seen this coming, she realized. How could a man like Crane, knowing flight was possible, even common, not gravitate to it? If they survived the week, he’d probably be a pilot by Christmas.

And yet… Crane was still, at times, flummoxed by his seatbelt latch. He showed no interest in driving a car, and seemed happy to walk the four miles home to the cabin. In the weeks since he’d come into her life, Abbie hadn’t felt him ready for a store that didn’t have a bell that rang when you entered. By far the most complex building they’d been in was the local hospital, and Crane had been focused on immediate concerns (when he could focus at all) at the time. Come to think, she didn’t believe he’d been more than five miles from the police station – hadn’t been to a mall, or Manhattan, or even over the Tappen Zee. 

And now she was thinking of taking him to an airport? Onto a plane? How would she get him through security?

How would the world cope with Ichabod Crane on the loose? Would he take over the planet, or never emerge from the first revolving door he encountered?

“I’m surprised you believe me about this flying machine business,” she said.

Ichabod had stopped swooping his hand around and was now looking out his window. “Well, you’ve never mislead me about anything important. Or at least anything I can verify,” he said. “Also, I believe the object aloft to our right bears out your description.”

They were still a few moments from the traffic lights of Sleepy Hollow’s downtown, so Abbie pulled over into the gravel lot of an electronics warehouse. Sure enough, a small commuter jet was passing low to their right, turning southeast. Abbie suppressed the urge to point and proclaim, “See, see!”

It took her a moment to realize that Ichabod didn’t look pleased. “What’s wrong?” she asked, pulling back onto the road.

“These are common?” he asked. “You see these daily?”

“Many times a day,” she replied. 

Ichabod swallowed. “I can only hope that some animal part of my being, realizing that you did not consider them a threat, discounted them so as to focus on more immediate concerns.”

“Perhaps,” she said, wondering where Ichabod was heading.

“Yes, perhaps,” he said. “More likely, I, a man who considers himself the most rational of our species, failed to see these airplanes because I had no explanation for them. My narrowness of mind blinded me.” He slapped the dashboard, hard. “How many such things exist, Abbie? How much of the world am I – is every man or woman – blind to? How can we ask anyone – a person such as your Captain Irving, for example – to see the evils that we are fighting, if their understanding simply cannot allow it?”

A quote came to Abbie. “There are more things in heaven and earth than our dreamt of in our philosophies,” she said.

Though she was pretty sure she’d mangled the line, Crane immediately brightened. “William Shakespeare! I think he’s brilliant, never mind the critics. You’ve seen _Hamlet_?”

“Everyone knows at least ten Shakespeare quotes,” she said.

“Well, well,” said Crane. “Airplanes and Hamlet and headless horsemen. What a world.”

“What a world indeed,” said Abbie, pulling into the first open spot in the PD lot. “Let’s go surf the web.”

* * * THE END * * *


End file.
